Why I Still Love This Country

CALLER: Brilliant dittos from student to mentor, sir. I have a comment that I really need to hear your thoughts on.

RUSH: Okay, great. Thank you very much.

CALLER: I need to know why you love this country today.

RUSH: Wait a minute. I’m having trouble understanding what you’re saying. You need to know why I love the country today?

CALLER: Yes. How can you love the country without bringing up an example of something good or great within our history 20, 30, 50 to a hundred years ago? Why do you love this country today? You said it’s not a government of, by and for the people. I’ve said that for years. Why do you love the country today?

RUSH: Do you not love the country today?

CALLER: It depends on my mood when I wake up. If I think mostly about the sacrifices that George Washington and our founders made, I love my country. I love everything it symbolized. I love what it could be. I love, you know, that we have been the greatest force for good in the world.

RUSH: There you go. Why give up on that? I’m not prepared to give up on that.

CALLER: Our country moved away from Great Britain to become what it was.

RUSH: Yeah, exactly.

CALLER: Well, then what can we do today to make our country great again? I’m not one of these crazies. I want to fix America. I don’t want to separate from anything. I want to take what we have, move it back to what it was founded on.

RUSH: You keep fighting for it. You have to keep fighting and defeating the forces that are trying to destroy it.

CALLER: It’s hard to do with so many of us that are ill-informed —

RUSH: Well, everything worthwhile is hard to do. Do you want to give up? Do you want to just say it’s over?

CALLER: No. I want to be put on the right track. I want to play a part in making my country great again. I have my own ideas, but there’s not enough time to talk with you about them on the air. I’m moving forward with my own plans. I have no way of knowing if they’re gonna be successful or not. Really what I’m interested in is why you love this country today, because I look around and I don’t see much to love today.

RUSH: I do.

CALLER: I see corruption all the way through our government.

RUSH: I do, too, but I know enough — you know, this poll that I just talked about, this 90% of Americans agree on all this stuff. Let me tell you something. I approach attitudinally this program every day with that belief. I come in here every day knowing that the people in this audience are the people in that poll, though it may be flawed. I know that the people in this audience love and cherish this country, they believe in God, everything I went through in that list, they believe. They want it. They want it to triumph.

Everybody I know understands this country’s in deep trouble. Nobody I know wants to give up on it. Even people I know who could split the scene, who could fly the coop, don’t want to. It’s worth saving. You love it, because it’s yours. You love it because you have the opportunity to influence it and change it. There’s nothing wrong with the country. There’s nothing wrong with the way it was founded. There’s nothing wrong with its history. There’s nothing wrong with what it was that made this country great. What’s wrong is not enough people have any understanding of that anymore, and that’s an objective that needs to change. That’s an objective that needs to take place.

That was my whole point in talking about Scott Pelley in the opening monologue in this segment. He’s out there getting an award talking about the news media and how often they get things wrong. That’s not their big problem. Their big problem is how they’re misinforming people because of a flawed agenda that they’ve got. I love this country because of what it has enabled me to do and my family. Nowhere else in the world could I have achieved the pinnacle of my success using just my natural abilities and freedom. This is the only place in the world where this would have been allowed to happen. Even though it’s under assault every day, even though it’s under attack every day, it still happened, and it is still happening for lots of people.

It needs to change in ways that make it possible for anybody who wants to succeed to be able to do it. The problem is, Americans are being told today that’s not possible, by their leaders. You just need to change the leadership of the country. It’s harder than it sounds, obviously, but no way do I want to give up on it. What do I love about what’s going on? There’s a lot of stuff I’m frightened by, a lot of stuff scares me, a lot of stuff has me angry, but not to the point of quitting. I love the potential. I love what it was. I love what it can be, and in certain cases, I love what it is. Still.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: This country is much more than its government. This country’s much more and better than the government, and it always has been. And I’ll tell you, why do I love this country every day? I love it every day because I have a chance. I have a golden opportunity here to tell people what I care about each and every day. This is such a golden opportunity. I’ve always believed, I still do and it’s the focus of what do here, I’ve always believed that this country is only as good as the level of informed status that people that live in this country have. I’m focused every day on creating the largest bloc of informed people possible, doing what little I can do in that regard, ’cause I think that’s where it all turns.

I have a belief, intrinsic belief in the decency and goodness of people, that this country makes possible. But right now we’re in an entitlement society. Right now we have an entitlement state, it seems, a welfare state, where more and more people have been conditioned to believe they can’t do anything without some assistance from somebody, particularly government. That’s not how this country came to exist. It’s not how this country became a superpower. And it sure as heck isn’t how this country’s gonna remain one. And it sure as heck is worth remaining one.

Powerful forces are doing what they can to diminish this country. And it’s worth opposing that each and every day in whatever ways possible. My way is attempting to inform as many people as possible each and every day of the truth, which is itself subjective, unfortunately, but still I know it when I see it.